Five things to know about Identity & Access Management

Traditional technologies such as IBM, Oracle were engineered more than 10 years ago. In as much as they are proven and comprehensive they may not be suitable to handle today’s needs. Examples are quick on-boarding of cloud applications, easy deployment of access attestation/re-certification solutions. Their technologies such as SSO, password management can truly be archaic.

2) SaaS based IAM solutions are there but needs to be examined carefully.

“All IDaaS solutions are not the same”. The leadership positions are yet to be taken, therefore transforming the rookie of today to the king tomorrow. A set of vendors offer commodity solutions like SSO. But these may not be your long term vendor if you are looking for deep-dive provisioning or access governance solutions that require deep domain experience and service value addition.

3) Service expertise is as important for IDaaS as traditional IAM.

You are not going to work with IDaaS without expert support in customization, operations & support. IDaaS in its basic form only eliminates capital expenditure on software & hardware. The need for expert guidance in areas like assuring smooth operation and chalking out expansion strategies are still needed.

4) Watch out for cost of IDaaS.

You must compare the cost of IDaaS over a five year term. Intangibles like vendor experience in IAM are equally important while doing the comparison. The cost of building incremental features like integrating to more applications, business process changes, etc also must be considered. Many customers are realizing that having these features in “perpetual licence ” mode but delivered in the cloud may be more cost effective.

5)IAM is a garbage in, garbage out technology.

The effectiveness of IGA implementation is only as good as the quality of your data. Cleaning up of orphan accounts and multiple ids, duplications and other basic hygiene factors will eventually determine your success in IGA implementation.